...this sublime original offers mystery and magic in gloopy, ric, black and white images that feel like the fevered opium dream of their esteemed creator...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 23, 2024

Just like a great play, the flow of dialogue here is excellent and there are so many strong concepts throughout the feature.

| Aug 17, 2023

A magical film where each image, like the lark in the mirror, reflects only itself, that is to say, us.

| Apr 6, 2022

Orpheus is a film of mirrors and windows. For Cocteau the answer to the question of whether the cinema is a window through which we observe others or a mirror in which we observe ourselves is that it is both and neither...

| Mar 26, 2020

Cocteau saw film as a kind of poetry on celluloid, and never is that more clear than in Orpheus, which is the director's ultimate statement of his own artistic philosophies.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 5, 2019

It's a familiar tale but one which feels fresh and fascinating.

| Jan 28, 2019

It has the mystery and elasticity of a dream, and all the farcical comic horror of chancing across the intricate contents of the Blessed Virgin's lingerie collection.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 18, 2018

A poet, novelist, painter, sculptor and opium addict, Cocteau only had time to make a handful of films. Watch Orphe and ponder what might have been.

| Dec 7, 2012

A magical enduring classic, to be seen again and again.

| Dec 7, 2012

Pretentious? Certainly, but full of the joy of filmmaking and there is a fairly coherent light through all the madness. It may illuminate man's obsessions and idol worship in a cautionary way, but Cocteau is also embracing those very ideas with his film.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 27, 2011

a paragon of magical realism that transports the ancient Greek myth into the then-modern realm of postwar France

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 12, 2011

If you're the kind of amateur existentialist who admires the ring of a sentence like "look a lifetime in a mirror and you will see Death at work", then this beautiful film is for you.

| Jan 10, 2011

Jean Cocteau's scripting and directing give the film its proper key of unworldliness.

| Mar 26, 2009

Comes as close as cinema can to poetry.

| Original Score: A | Oct 20, 2006

Cocteau's visual imagination, leading us through mirrors into a bomb-scarred dreamworld governed by the femme fatale of Death, is enduringly magical and strongly cinematic.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 1, 2006

Somnambulistic symbolism may be art for art's sake. Maybe not. This writer finds it slightly tiresome.

| Mar 25, 2006

Its tight cross-lacing of paranoid dreaming and poetic realism grips like a bondage corset.

| Feb 11, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 11, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 8, 2004

Jean Cocteau's updating of the Orpheus myth to post-Liberation Paris is one of cinema's great artistic masterpieces, a piece of Mlis-like magic that is intensely powerful and moving even at its most bewildering.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 9, 2004